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Of Poems and Doodles: Basquiat’s Inner Being

‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks’ opens at the Brooklyn Museum

By

Andy Beta

April 1, 2015 8:04 p.m. ET

A few days before the opening of “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” at the Brooklyn Museum, Michael Holman and Larry Warsh strolled around the fourth-floor gallery, looking at these early works of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose brief, meteoric career in the early ’80s put him at the forefront of modern art.

The show, which runs Friday through Aug. 23, will present the contents of eight previously unseen notebooks of an artist for whom words and phrases were as integral to his paintings as color, line and symbols.